A woman leaves flowers at a makeshift memorial near Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut December 15, 2012. (Reuters)
According to FOX News Sunday there have been 13 mass shootings in the United States this year. Yet, despite these recent mass shootings in Aurora and Wisconsin and Connecticut, there is no rise in mass killings in the United States according to a prominent criminologist.
WAFF reported, via Free Republic:
Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has written a history of mass murders in America, said that while mass shootings rose between the 1960s and the 1990s, they actually dropped in the 2000s. And mass killings actually reached their peak in 1929, according to his data. He estimates that there were 32 in the 1980s, 42 in the 1990s and 26 in the first decade of the century.
Chances of being killed in a mass shooting, he says, are probably no greater than being struck by lightning.
Still, he understands the public perception – and extensive media coverage – when mass shootings occur in places like malls and schools. “There is this feeling that could have been me. It makes it so much more frightening.”